Behind the scenes at Dreamforce, Salesforce’s tech...

1of10Brigitte Donner, Dreamforce conference charimwoman, checks a display being set up in the Einstein Ridge zone at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The annual conference hosted by Salesforce featurs a national park theme this year and is expected to draw more than 170,000 attendees.Photo: Photos by Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

2of10The Dreamforce conference features a national park theme this year.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

4of10Traffic on Howard Street is diverted onto Third Street as construction crews build sets for the Dreamforce conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif. on Friday, Sept. 21, 2018. The one block stretch of Howard is closed between Third and Fourth streets for the annual conference hosted by Salesforce, which features a national park theme and is expected to draw as many as 170,000 attendees.Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

5of10A crew pulls on a large section of artificial grass that will be spread across Howard Street for the Dream Forest zone for the Dreamforce conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

6of10Workers put finishing touches on the 60th floor of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

7of10Dreamforce characters are emblazoned on the staircase leading down to the keynote address auditorium at Moscone Center in San Francisco.Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

10of10A construction worker works on the 60th floor of Salesforce Tower with a view of the Bay Bridge below.Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

It was the week before Dreamforce, the conference extravaganza organized by Salesforce, and the tech company’s design team was listening to a recording of animals chirping and cooing in the woods.

“I’m wondering if we could tone down the woodpecker a little,” said Brigitte Donner, chairwoman of Dreamforce, which will fill San Francisco’s Moscone Center this week.

The design team agreed to look into tweaking the sound volumes, which will be played in an area of the conference made to resemble a national park, complete with trees and rock formations. Another area will look like a gemstone mine, while a staircase will feature a painting of a river.

Planning for Dreamforce continues to the moment the four-day conference begins Tuesday. It’s one of the largest tech conventions in the world, with 171,000 registered attendees last year — equivalent to nearly a fifth of the population of San Francisco. And the downtown will feel its full effects — with packed restaurants, crowded sidewalks and gridlocked traffic. San Francisco Travel, the city’s visitor’s bureau, expects the conference to lead to $157 million in direct business sales in the Bay Area and support 35,000 direct jobs.

A “small percentage of people find it irritating,” said Gwyneth Borden, executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which represents San Francisco’s eating places. “People who see the bigger picture appreciate being inconvenienced, knowing that it’s an engine for the local economy.”

A Dreamforce creative team holds a meeting at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Photo: Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle

Salesforce sells tools to companies to manage their clients and business leads, and Dreamforce is a showcase for Salesforce’s products. Its more than 3,400 educational sessions have names like “Leveraging Mobile for Student Success,” “Making Disagreement Fun (Really!)” and “Are You Smarter Than a Goldfish?” The conference also increasingly reflects Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff’s global ambitions as a philanthropist. (Ten days before Dreamforce starts, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, said they are buying Time magazine for $190 million.)

Salesforce will announce a major donation when the conference opens Tuesday. A portion of Dreamforce will also focus on climate change two weeks after California Gov. Jerry Brown’s Global Climate Action Summit, was also held in Moscone Center. Twenty-two monks from France will lead meditation sessions.

Speakers include former Vice President Al Gore, Golden State Warriors basketball star and tech investor Andre Iguodala and rapper and musician will.i.am. Donner said 2018 is the “year of the CEO,” with more corporate chiefs speaking at Dreamforce than ever before, including the heads of PG&E, Kaiser Permanente and Marriott International.

Restaurants around Moscone Center are anticipating a flood of hungry attendees.

Kathy Fang, the chef and co-owner of Fang Restaurant near Moscone Center, expects two to three times the normal foot traffic during Dreamforce, and customers during the usually quiet time between lunch and dinner.

“It’s like prepping for war,” she said. “We’re looking forward to it, but we also know it’s going to be rough days ahead of us.”

Other vendors provide drinks and food at the conference. One San Francisco coffee maker, Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, turned down a $40,000 contract for Dreamforce. The move was in response to Salesforce’s work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection amid the Trump administration’s controversial immigration policies.

Large sections of foam are unloaded for assembly into a faux rock arch on Howard Street for the Dreamforce conference at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

Benioff said in July that Salesforce doesn’t work with the agency on family separation, a policy that the administration has since ended. In response to the controversy, he created an Office for the Ethical and Humane Use of Technology to vet employees’ concerns.

Salesforce has other detractors — particularly locals. The huge crowds make it harder to get a seat at restaurants, and downtown traffic is bumper to bumper. The city is keeping Howard Street between Third and Fourth streets closed, and there will be a few street closures around Civic Center, as well. One challenge for the conference is the $551 million expansion of Moscone Center, parts of which are closed off as the work — scheduled to be finished early next year — continues. Dreamforce’s space will be smaller than last year because of the construction.

“San Francisco is a great destination venue, but there is only so many rooms, cars, conference facility square feet in the city,” said Rod Mickels, co-founder of InVision Communications, an events company that has worked with tech giants including Oracle and Microsoft.

In an effort to reduce congestion, Salesforce will run shuttles from the conference to hotels and offer bike valets, Donner said.

“It’s a boon. You can charge or get $20,000 or $50,000 for an event. It’s hard to turn that down,” said Borden of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association.

For the third consecutive year, San Francisco cloud computing company FinancialForce is renting out Brazilian steak house Fogo de Chão on Third Street for the entire conference. The restaurant will host client meetings, and an outdoor area will have a DJ and Wi-Fi. FinancialForce will display its logo around the restaurant and expects to have about 500 visitors during the week.

It’s part of nearly $1.5 million that FinancialForce plans to spend at Dreamforce, which includes helping sponsor the conference itself, sponsoring Lyft and Uber rides for attendees and booking hotels for its staff. (Salesforce Ventures is an investor in FinancialForce, and the two companies are partners.)

The conference is large and can be overwhelming, but Studer said its continued popularity — Dreamforce, begun in 2003, has sold out each of the last three years — attests to both its appeal and business value.

“Is this too much? No, this is really a great experience,” Studer said. “Companies, they have a choice to do a lot of different things. They can vote with their feet. To come to San Francisco for a week — these people are busy — they’re not coming to a boondoggle.”

Another restaurant, Veranda, is booked all week for the third year by Acumen Solutions, a consulting firm that advises clients on cloud computing services including Salesforce’s products. The company, which is headquartered in Virginia and has a San Francisco office, uses the restaurant as the equivalent of an office and conference center.

Shally Stanley, managing director of global services at Acumen, has been attending Dreamforce for nearly a decade.

“Even nine years ago, it was a tremendously overwhelming experience to attend Dreamforce — in a positive way,” she said. “It’s grown tremendously since then.”

Acumen will spend millions of dollars and flies in 100 employees to San Francisco from around the country and United Kingdom for Dreamforce, Stanley said.

“It’s a logistical symphony,” she said.

The appeal of Dreamforce, beyond the “glamour and glitz” of the conference’s physical spectacle, is being able to talk to numerous customers, and for those customers to connect with each other, Stanley said.

And when customers connect, it will be among carefully selected set pieces. These include a 30-foot-tall waterfall installation and 50-foot-wide fake tree. Salesforce is installing an additional 345 live trees and 4,500 square feet of mulch at the conference.

“We really think of every little detail,” said Donner, the Dreamforce chairwoman, who has 25 employees on the Dreamforce design team.

One thousand feet above San Francisco, workers are also scrambling to complete another centerpiece of Salesforce’s empire.

Salesforce is opening an “Ohana” space — a Hawaiian term favored by Benioff that means family — on the 60th and 61st floors at the top of Salesforce Tower on Tuesday to coincide with the beginning of Dreamforce. It will host 500 attendees and staff.

The space will feature meeting rooms, a work area and kitchen, but in another reflection of the company’s philanthropic ambitions, the space will be open for nonprofits to host events for free.

“The idea is that it feels like a home. It doesn’t look like an office floor,” said Elizabeth Pinkham, the Salesforce executive vice president who oversees real estate.

The panoramic views stretch to each corner of the city, from the fog-infused Golden Gate Bridge to the distant industrial crane of the former Hunters Point shipyard. To the north, the historic financial center of the city gives way to the slopes of Telegraph Hill, where Salesforce started in an apartment in 1999.

Donner first attended the conference in 2010, a year before she joined Salesforce. “It gave me goosebumps,” Donner said. The event, she added, is like a “big, fun family reunion.”

Roland Li covers commercial real estate for the business desk, focusing on the Bay Area office and retail sectors.

He was previously a reporter at San Francisco Business Times, where he won one award from the California News Publishers Association and three from the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

He is the author of “Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports," a 2016 book on the history of the competitive video game industry. Before moving to the Bay Area in 2015, he studied and worked in New York. He freelanced for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and other local publications. His hobbies include swimming and urban photography.